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INTRODUCTION 7

ease elides body and commodity by positioning the diseased body of theworker as the outcome ofhis labor. Whether conservative (as in Chad-wick's laissez-faire politics) or radical (as in Engels's socialism), thisliterature consistently forwards the notion that what the factory systemreally mass-produces is pathology itself

Irf critiques of the factory system situate disease as the end product of1 labor, they also represent the worker's body as a quantity of raw material

that is subjected to a laborious, painful, and ultimately useless course ofmanufacture. According to these studies, indus trial disease remade theworker's body in the image of his trade. Jobs involving repetitive me-chanical movements, for instance, tended to cause unusual orthopedieproblems, generating joint deforrnities, permanent flexures, and evenparalyses that embodied the adaptive subordination of body parts tospecifie tools and machines. Engels describes a condition called "hind-leg," particular to lathe workers who had "from perpetually filing at thelathe, crooked backs and one leg crooked ... so that the two legs havethe form of a K" (210), while an r869 Lancetarticle anatornizes a condi-tion called "hephaestic herniplegia," or "harnmer palsy," in which pro-longed use of a severi-pound hammer caused gradual paralysis over theentire right sides of carpenters' bodies (quoted in Arlidge 554). ln thesedisorders, workers' bodies were overtaken by the work performance;physical disability marked the worker's complete appropriation by theactivity and apparatus of labor. J. T. Arlidge's exhaustive Hygiene Dis-easesand Mortality of Occupations (r892) contains numerous such exarn-ples. "Silk twisting," for instance, in which boys ran back and forthwhile holding a heavy skein of thread at arm's length, caused a corre-sponding "twisting of the trunk to that side"; the resulting spinal curva-ture and knee deformities represented a pathological embedding of thework activity in the body's structure, a debilitating confusion of act andobject, cause and effect: the twister finally became so twisted that hecould no longer perform the act of twisting (s57). Similarly, buttonmakers suffered from "choreitic movements of the hands and fingers ...due to erethism of the nerve centres of the brain from perpetuallydealing with minute objects in a monotonous fashion" (555); even at resttheir hands habitually fluttered through the routinized motions of theirwork (as such, button makers tragically realized the productive ideal of

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8 RAW MATERIAL

having certain skills at one's fingertips). ln these examples, labor re-forms the body in its own image, twisting, bending, and stiffening itinto postures that are at once perfectly adaptive and acutely patholog-ical. lndeed, debilitated workers frequently reported that they preferredthe very cramped, hunched-over positions that helped to produce theircomplaints. Engels notes that metal grinders suffering from respiratoryfailure compensated for their shortness of breath by obstructing theirown freedom of movement. ln an all-too-literal enactment oflaboredbreatbing, "they habitually raise the shoulders to relieve the permanentand increasingwant ofbreath; they bend forward, and seem, in general,to feel most comfortable in the crouching position in which they work"(2II-12).

Where some workers were so thoroughly worked over that theycame to embody the specifie motions of their own labor, others werechemicallyaltered by their own raw materials. Jobs requiring workersto handle toxic substances such as lead, arsenic, and phosphorus; tobreathe noxious fumes from naphtha, turpentine, and petroleum; or toinhale the thick dust from textile manufacture, bone and metal grind-ing, and coal mining, led to systemic problems such as slow poisoning,chronic respiratory failure, and progressive nerve damage. These dis or-ders involved a kind of corporeal amalgamation, a merging of workers'bodies with the raw materials of their trades. This pathological corn-bination of flesh and raw material was dramatically contained in thephlegmatic formations of workers suffering from industrial asthma.Metal grinders, for instance, coughed up balls of phlegm composed ofmucus and metallic dust (Engels 212), while colliers produced spittleblackened by coal. ln "grinder's asthma" and "black spit" the bodysrefuse revealed the raw materials of its trade: the grinder's expectora-tions marked his efforts to expel the needIelike metal fragments pierc-ing his bronchial tubes, while the rniner's charred saliva registered thefact that bis lungs were clogged with coal. lndustrial diseases thus in-corporated an entire problematic of materiality, emerging precisely atthe point where the raw materials of industry-flecks of glass, metalsplinters, textile dust, toxic fumes-entered the hum an body, embed-ding themselves in the tissues of the lungs, seeping through the skininto the bloodstream, collecting in the bones and liver and brain.

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INTRODUCTION 9

This problematic relation, in which manufacture altered bodilycomposition, took a variety of forms: indus trial disease manifested it-self as an adaptation of parts, as when the skeleton deformed itself to fita machine; as a mixing of hum an and industrial waste, as in metallicmucus or lumps of phlegmatic coal; and, most dramaticaily, as a chemi-cal reaction between flesh and raw material. Copper poisoning, forinstance, converted the worker into a kind of anatomical alloy; smeltersabsorbed so much metal that they acquired its chemical properties.They tasted like copper-coughing up dust leaves a "metallic, copperytas te" (Arlidge 442) in workers' mouths-and they even oxidized: ascopper molecules fused with oxygen in the bodys tissues, the hair,gums, urine and stools ail took on a greenish tint (442-44). Likewise,matchmakers suffering from phosphorus poisoning became phospho-rescent. As the phosphorus penetrated into the jaw and spread to thesurrounding tissues of the head and neck, workers laboring undermatchmaker's necrosis began to glow; indeed, with their luminouslydecomposing heads atop comparatively inert bodies, matchmakerswith "phossy jaw" were living lucifer matches in their own right.!'lndustrial diseases thus incorporated a process in which the com-pounding of tissue and toxin was so thorough that they could no longerbe told apart.

The imaginative significance of industrial diseases-as signs of in-humane working conditions, and, more broadly, as evidence of howindus trial capitalism reconfigures the body-can be seen in ElizabethGaskell's novel North and South (r855), wherein a character namedBessy Higgins dies of respira tory failure after working in an unventi-lated Manchester cotton mill. Troubled by a chronic cough and in-creasingly unable to breathe, she attributes her asthmatic condition to"fiuff. ... Little bits, as fly off fro' the cotton, when they're carding it,and fill the air till it looks all fine white dust. They say it winds roundthe lungs, and tightens them up. Anyhow, there's many a one as worksin a carding-room, that Falls into a waste, coughing and spitting blood,because they're just poisoned by the fiuff" (146). Although Bessy's im-age of the strangulating action of fiuff is highly impressionistic, not tomention anatomically impossible (dust breathed into the lungs couldnever wrap itself around them), the basic impulse behind her descrip-

JO RAW MATERIAL

tion is technically correct: indus trial diseases ernbody a process bywhich the material body and the raw materials of industry becomehopelessly intertwined.

It is in this context that we can begin to understand the figurativeconnection between disease and industry in Victorian medical litera-ture. The material patterns ofindustrial pathology found a metaphori-cal counterpart in medical models of disease, which mapped productivelanguage onto pathological process as a means of investigating themeaning of corporealiry in machine culture. The chapters that fol1owstudy various dimensions of this broad dynamic. Organized by disease,Raw Material is made up of four case studies that work together toshow how the specifie manifestations ofindividual diseases became themeans ofinvestigating the effect of"progress" on personhood. Chapterl focuses on the deadly modern plague, Asiatic cholera. An Easterndisease that ravaged England on four separate occasions between 183Iand r865, cholera materialized anxieties about cultural contamination.Brought over from India on ships and then circulated through thestreets of English cities, it provided a figure for the threatening fluidityof cultural and bodily boundaries in an imperialist world economy. Bylooking at how choleric pathology came to be symptomatic of the widerdegenerative patterns of machine culture, this chapter lays the ground-work for later ones by raising questions about the relationship betweenmateriali ty and metaphor in Victorian thought. Chapter 2 shows how aconceptual antipathy between femininity and the factory system mod-ulated the social construction of breast cancer. Describing malignantmasses as mass productions, the discourse ofbreast cancer drew on thevocabulary of machine culture to developan "objective" approach to aheartbreakinglyinvasive and ail-but-incurable disease. The third chap-ter extends this investigation ofhow mechanization affected models ofselfhood. Assessing the impact of dismemberment and prosthesis onnotions of working-class masculinity, it shows how, in merging malebodies with machines, prosthetics reconstituted injured soldiers andindustrial workers through a utilitarian model of gender: by restoringphysical mobility,artificiallimbs suggested that ail a man needed to betruly himself was a working body. Chapter 4 anatomizes the symbolicimportance of deforrnity for Victorian culture, analyzing how the freak@~

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16 RAW MATERIAL

stilted and mechanical, subordinated to the automotive requirementsof machines, the problem of distinguishing between people and thingswas more than just an interesting philosophical question: it was a press-ing and immediate concern. The firstvolurne ofMarx's Capita! (1867) isperhaps the most famous articulation ofhow capitalism scrambles dis-tinctions between bodies and objects by falsely animating things andfataily mechanizing workers.!" However, Marx's account of materialand mechanical threat must be seen as one of a series of competingnarratives about materiality circulating during this time. The notion ofbodies being overtaken or replaced by machines, for instance, was usedtoward a number of ideological ends. lndustrial novels such as HardTimes (r854) and Mary Barton (r848) anticipate the trajectory of ac-counts like Marx's, arguing that because workers are irreducibly humanthey cannot survive a system that expects them to be machines-the"Hands" in Dickens's Coketown suffer precisely because they are not"only hands, or, like the lower creatures of the seashore, only hands andstomachs" (Hard Times 70). Other discourses, however, imagine mech-anization as a means of securing an ail-roc-vulnerable humanity. As Igo on to show in chapter 3, this is the operative fantasy of prosthesis,which imagines that the amputee's sense ofhimself as a whole man canbe restored by merging his mangled limb with a machine.

As the example of prosthesis suggests, narratives that placed peopleand property in dynamic relation to one another, imagining that selvescould intermingle with their stuffin mutuaily constitutive and enablingways, were deeply compelling. To take just one example, Victorianwriters developed an entire epistemology-even a psychology-of thatquintessentially English artifact, the umbrella. The umbrella was seento reflect, extend, and even complete its owner's personality: as an r858Househo!d Words essay on "People's Umbrellas [as indices to character]"puts it, "This humble instrument is cherished as a street god-a corn-panion-a something to hold silent communion with-an appendagewhich, like a dog or a walking-stick, is modified by the character of itsowner, while it becomes, at the same time part of his system, exerting aninfluence over him equal to what it receives" (Hollingshead 496). Thislogic of material reciprocity, in which elemental and individual qualitiescross over to create a perfect economy of character, appears over andover again in Victorian writing. Elsewhere in Househo/d Words,Dickens

INTRODUCTION Il

describes his umbrella as a kind of phrenological prosthesis, a silkenskull containing "all the best bumps in my head" ("Please to Leave YourUmbrella" 457), while "People's Umbrellas" depicts a nervous man'sumbrella as an emotional wreck, an uns table structure with outbursts sopowerful that it continually keels over and even occasionallywets itself.When propped up against the wall, "the ill-constructed nuisance openswith a burst and a splutter, falling helplessly in the little pool which ithas deposited on the carpet" (Hollingshead 496). (There was help forsuch cases-a shop in Shoreditch advertised itself as an Umbrella Hos-pital, and, claiming to be able to do both physical and psychologicalrepairs, charged sixpence for such minor services as "restoring a brokenrib," "inserting a new spine," and supplying "new motive power," andone shilling for the more complex operations involved in "restoring ashattered constitution," "resuscitating the muscularia," "supplying anew head," and "supplying a new set of nerves" [Crawford I9I].)15Taking on human features so completely that they seem to be, paradox-ically, essential to their owners' sense of themselves as autonomousindividuals, umbrellas embodied a fantasy of a world in which the mas-sive proliferation of objects worked to solidify subjects, in which theleast palpable qualities of being-taste, intelligence, frame of mind-could be materialized within the contours of thing0

If personal property was seen as an extension of specifie person-alities, popular accounts of manufacture commonly attributed humanqualities to raw materials. An 1850 Household Words essay entitled "APaper-Mill" tells how rags are made into paper from the perspective ofthe materials-fust rags, then pulp, and finally paper+themselves.Similarly, popular and technical accounts of vulcanization depict therefinement of india rubber as a civilizing process, a socialization ofsubstance in which an exotic and unruly black mass is whitened, sta-bilized, and made into a range of socially useful products." Together,these examples indicate the imaginative potential embedded within theepistemological and material confusions of machine culture, the sensethat leveling constitutive distinctions between people and things en-abled new models ofidentity and materiality to be conceptualized evenas that levelingjeopardized distinctions among selves, their bodies, andthe larger material world. This book situates pathology at the heart ofthis broad cultural dynamic. The physical alterations caused by disease